This Blog is dedicated to Brent Goose - the smallest and northernmost breeding goose in the World, and the one that also undertakes some of the longest non-stop journeys of any goose species in the World. It was launched with our Brenttags project in May 2011 - funded by the Norwegian Directorate for Nature Management. Blog revived with the successful addition of 9 satellite tagged birds in May 2012. All pictures can be seen in a higher resolution by clicking on them.

18 May 2012

17 May: Will Ludvig fly to Greenland?

Data from the next four birds caught at 7
May on Valsted Enge have now been sent from the radiotransmitters via the
satellites to Argos in France, and are available to us. They do not reveal a
behavior that is notably different from the other birds presented below.
Instead of showing four more maps that is virtually identical with geese mainly
staging on the small islets in the inlet, I will recall some previous tracking
results, but first present our next bird:

Ludvig is named after Ludvig Munsterhjelm (1880-1955), finnish zoologist and
hunter, who in one of his many travel and hunting depictions ”Sommar
i Norra Ishavet: jakt-, djur- och reseskildningar från Ishavet och Spetsbergen”
(1911) described how the brent geese, found in June 1910 at Prins Karls Forland
(the northwesternmost island in the Svalbard archipelago), occasionally migrated
towards northwest over the Arctic Ocean (thus en route towards Greenland). In 1997 during our
first satellite tracking study we found that some geese migrated directly from
Denmark to Greenland – and in 2001 we had the first example of a goose that
migrated via Svalbard to Greenland, as Munsterhjelm had mentioned. Thus it is
recommended that scientists occasionally read old books – and thanks to librarian
and birdwatcher Mikael Lagerborg, who dug this old information out of the
shelves in a library.

Sources: The satellite tracking studies carried out in 1997 and 2001 have been dealt with in depth by:

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About

We (Preben Clausen, Tony Fox, Kevin Clausen, Marie Silberling Vissing) are a group of happy goose researchers from Department of Bioscience at Aarhus University who will be sharing the results of the Brentttags project with you